Improving the Robustness of AI-Based Malware Detection Using Adversarial Machine Learning

Cyber security is used to protect and safeguard computers and various networks from ill-intended digital threats and attacks. It is getting more difficult in the information age due to the explosion of data and technology. There is a drastic rise in the new types of attacks where the conventional signature-based systems cannot keep up with these attacks. Machine learning seems to be a solution to solve many problems, including problems in cyber security. It is proven to be a very useful tool in the evolution of malware detection systems. However, the security of AI-based malware detection models is fragile. With advancements in machine learning, attackers have found a way to work around such detection systems using an adversarial attack technique. Such attacks are targeted at the data level, at classifier models, and during the testing phase. These attacks tend to cause the classifier to misclassify the given input, which can be very harmful in real-time AI-based malware detection. This paper proposes a framework for generating the adversarial malware images and retraining the classification models to improve malware detection robustness. Different classification models were implemented for malware detection, and attacks were established using adversarial images to analyze the model’s behavior. The robustness of the models was improved by means of adversarial training, and better attack resistance is observed.